


For All the Things That Could Have Been

by Captain_Loki



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gen Fic, Pre - Philosopher's Stone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-08
Updated: 2012-03-08
Packaged: 2017-11-01 15:28:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Captain_Loki/pseuds/Captain_Loki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This animosity between them, it wasn't always the case</p>
            </blockquote>





	For All the Things That Could Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> I'll warn for child abuse to be safe, but it's basically what we see in the HP canon

It hadn’t always been like this, Dudley thought, staring down at the scrawny boy trembling before him. Piers was smacking his fist against his open palm, threateningly, though Dudley knew it was all for show. Dudley gave Harry an almost apologetic look, and Harry stared back at him with an indiscernible expression on his face. It was something like resignation, almost an understanding that Dudley didn’t think he’d have shown himself, if the situation were reversed.

“C’mon D!” Piers hissed, casting him an expectant glare. Dudley just huffed out a laugh and crossed his arms over his broad chest, but before he could do anything a loud bell sounded, and the recess monitors began calling everyone back. Piers looked disappointed and he kicked the brick wall behind Harry with frustration and waved Dudley and the rest of the gang away.

Harry relaxed visibly against the wall, his shoulders slumping slightly, and Dudley moved away, when he looked back Harry’s face was turned towards the other side of the small alley between the school building and the chain link fence and the street beyond, but Dudley was fairly certain he saw Harry’s eyes sparkling with the tears he never seemed to shed.

It hadn’t always been like this. Harry Potter had been there since before Dudley’s earliest memory, there was no life before Harry, and those first years with his cousin were untainted by biases and prejudices that would spring up between them in the years to come, but back then, he was just Harry.

He was always so small for his age, skinny, and looking back on it now he wonders how much genetics had to do with it, and how much of it was his parents’ fervent belief that Harry didn’t deserve the same as Dudley, no matter what it was, it was bordering on absurdity in certain areas, but somewhere along the line he knew that he had begun believing it to be true.

Harry barely spoke when he was a toddler, when Dudley himself was babbling nonsensically to his mother and father about everything that popped into his head, because his mother would fawn and his father would call him ‘little tyke’ and it’d make him laugh and laugh. They called Harry stupid, he remembered that, it was a fuzzy sort of image in his head, like he wasn’t sure if he remembered or his mind had just invented it after years and years of similar abuses at the hands of the parents he loves.

But Harry was anything but stupid, he just knows now that Harry never talked because…no one ever listened. Except, Dudley; Dudley did, and he listened to Harry tell stories about his imaginary friends, and he remembered being so angry with Harry for having a friend who was a brontosaurus and he couldn’t see it. Harry insisted it was there, but no matter what Dudley did, he simply couldn’t.

Dudley was never a small child the way Harry was, all knobby knees and skinny limbs, but Harry was the perfect size to fit through the opening in their playpen, and he’d sneak out while his mother was busy in the kitchen, or sticking her head out the window in an attempt to catch the latest gossip wafting in on summer days. He’d crawl up the stairs as fast as his legs could take him and bring them back armfuls of toys.

The day his mother caught Harry sneaking back down the stairs, was the first time he ever heard Harry cry. He was three years old and his mother was screaming, and he didn’t understand what was happening, but she wrenched Harry’s arm and put him in the little cupboard beneath the stairs, slamming the lock in place.

He remembered staring at the door, big and imposing. He remembered thinking clearly that the little shafts at the top and bottom weren’t enough to let the light in, It’s dark in there he thought, and it scared him, so he cried. He wailed and his mother came running and bounced him in her arms and cooed and told him, “Mummy isn’t mad at her wittle Dudders, no no, Mummy loves her Dudders! It is nasty Harry that is being punished not my Diddykins!” But that wasn’t what he was so upset about, but he didn’t know how to tell her so he let himself be lulled into complacency instead.

Dudley sat in the back of the small classroom, with Piers on his left, and Kenny Smith on his right. He had a clear, unobstructed view of the back of Harry’s head, his hair sticking up in cowlicks that never went away, no matter how hard his mother tried. The first time Harry woke up the morning after a violent haircut with his head a mess of jet black flyaway hair he had laughed, but his mother hadn’t found it at all amusing and she shut Harry up in his makeshift bedroom.

Dudley asked him through the thin paneled door how he had done it, but Harry had insisted he had no idea how. “Overactive follicles?” He had suggested with a shrug, and Dudley hadn’t even known what follicles were but sometimes Harry read the old worn dictionary that he had found tucked in the corner of the cupboard. He knew lots of words, Dudley remembered, for a kid of only six.

His mother shooed him away from the cupboard door when she’d find him curled up outside it, she’d tell him to go upstairs and play video games, and she’d wait and watch while he booted up his old pc and played three or four games of asteroid before she was satisfied that he was doing what ‘good boys did, not hanging around talking with riff raff like Harry Potter’, his mother called him ‘a bad influence’ and Dudley wasn’t ever really sure what she meant by that.

Sometimes at night Dudley would wait until his mother and father were fast asleep before he’d sneak downstairs and drag a chair out of the kitchen to boost himself up to unlock the cupboard door. He and Harry would play Atari in the living room for hours, or read comics by torchlight in his bedroom, until they had to sneak back before his parents woke up.

The last night of summer vacation, just before they began Year 3 was their last midnight adventure, for in the morning Dudley’s mother and father stumbled upon their sleeping forms, sprawled on blankets and cushions pulled from couch, masses of sugary sweets and empty bottles of mountain dew littered like debris around them.

His father had yelled; his mother had looked disappointed. His father had grounded him, and his mother had questioned his behavior. He had shrugged, unsure of what to say to explain how he and Harry were just having some fun. But Harry wasn’t supposed to have fun, Harry was supposed to keep out of their way and do as he was told.

“Did Harry make you do this?” His mother had asked, her voice was soft and placating, her eyes almost pleading and expectant. He had looked at Harry, staring sadly from the hallway. He hadn’t known what to say, he wanted to make his parents happy, the fawning look, the ‘little tyke’ and he shrugged, with a nod and said,

“Yes.”

Then that something between he and Harry had broken, microscopic cracks that had always been there, in every jeer, or look, or meal that was too tiny, and every time Harry was ignored, until it cracked in fissures down the middle of a brotherhood that could have been, but wasn’t ever going to be.

“Hey Dud,” Piers had whispered from beside him, and Dudley turned and stretched out a hand to take the hollow straw Pier’s offered. He licked the strip of paper torn from the edge of his homework and balled it up into a soggy mess, and he put the straw to his lips and aimed.

He sighed heavily, and contemplated for a fraction, before he blew, and thought,

It hadn’t always been like this.


End file.
